770- Power

Discussion (24) ¬

It’s LP helping the aliens all over again. These people just don’t realise how powerful his gaze is. They try to apply it, but don’t build infrastructure strong enough to support it. And then they blame him.

Wouldn’t that plan require LP to pretty much spend the rest of his life staring at a pool of water? The thing about reactors is that they don’t shut down if the guy on the console has to go to the bathroom.

The setup is silly, but ideally a heat producer metahuman could heat up something large enough to retain heat for hours. Thermally run solar power works this way, an array of moving mirrors focus the sun to heat a massive column to ridiculous temperatures, the column boils water for hours.

Problem is, the pool of water is open to the air, so it can’t get much over 100C, depending on barometric pressure, without boiling away. And that’s if the metahuman is a heat producer instead of the destructive beams that LP produces. And even then, you only get the steam at 100C, and since all heat engines are limited by temperature difference between coolant and heat source, you don’t get too much energy out of it. Most power plants heat the steam to super-heated, under great pressure, so it looks to me like this is insufficiently contained.

While it’s possible to convert heat directly into electricity, such thermoelectric generators are typically more expensive and less efficient than standard heat engines. Steam is apparently a reasonably efficient way to convert the heat into mechanical energy to turn a generator. Plus, it’s a mature technology, with more than a century of development to make it as safe, efficient and reliable as possible.

However, may I point out that there was a reason vehicles began to use internal combustion engines rather than steam engines. I’m just surprised I’ve never heard of an ICE-powered generator (excluding jury-rigged ones involving jacked-up trucks, etc.).

There’s a reason that the only place power generation uses internal combustion engines is in portable one-household generators. It’s also the reason that airplanes moved from pistons to jets.

Turbines can be a heck of a lot more efficient than piston systems, and they are fundamentally simpler. Heat creates pressure, and the pressure difference creates circular motion.* But at its heart, a jet engine is a turbine running a fan**, a relatively simple setup. Turbines also take up more space and mass, so for small, intermittent, single-person use, the tradeoffs favor internal combustion systems.

* – disclaimer: actually MAKING an efficient turbine is a difficult undertaking, with testing and modeling and more. There’s a reason that companies like GE manage to secure their share of the market for a century+.

**- MODERN jets are ridiculous in that the combustion chamber (where the turbine lives) actually reaches temperatures that should melt the turbine blades. So the blades are hollow, with small holes drilled in them, and then air is pumped through them to leave a film of cool air on the blade surface, cooling it and insulating it. Takes some crazy math, machining, and quality control to make the stuff. But OTOH, you could NEVER run a piston at those temps, so you get really better energy production from your heat source. So I’d bet some modern generators do the same insane tricks to produce power…

They… have. This is why he’s blind. It’s his origin story in the like, first ten(?) strips of the comic. The black things over his eye sockets aren’t eyes, they’re just lenses or something that let the laser go through. Honestly I don’t know that it’s been explained what the anime-eye-looking-goobers over his eyes on his mask actually are. But he vaporized his eyes, so they are most definitely not his eyes.